Word: melodrama
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...Koresh and his followers heightened the melodrama, their ties with the outside world became irretrievably broken. "The adulation of this confined group works on this charismatic leader so that he in turn spirals into greater and greater paranoia," says Murray Miron, a psychologist who advised the FBI during the standoff. "He's playing a role that his followers have cast him in." In the end, Koresh and his flock may have magnified one another's needs. He looked to them to confirm his belief that he was God's appointed one, destined for a martyr's death. They looked...
This is not De Niro's fault. The movie goes where movies must go: toward melodrama. And toward the current fashion (Jack the Bear, Radio Flyer) for taking up but not fully confronting child abuse. Something more subtle is going on in Wolff's book, a confrontation with a richer, quirkier past and his emerging self that the movie too often brushes aside...
...cautionary tale about the devastating effects of global warming. Part 1 is a stunner, combining epic special effects with sharp detail to tell the poignant story of an everyfamily struggling to adapt to a disastrous world. Part 2, alas, goes astray, slighting environmental and social issues for mundane family melodrama...
...Value closed in preview, and now Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly, Burn This) has opened REDWOOD CURTAIN, a would-be poetic musing on ecology, Vietnam, capitalism and multicultural heritage. If you think something is deeply sick in the national soul, then the play, for all its philosophical incoherence and melodrama (about a Vietnamese immigrant seeking her ex-G.I. father), may speak to you. If you live in the world most Americans inhabit, you will probably find it windy, vacant, awkwardly staged and ineptly acted, except by the superb Debra Monk as the girl's sardonic aunt...
...quick summary, this is melodrama. As the novel winds and backtracks, it is a convincing psychological unraveling. A question, after this strong second book, is whether Harrison can manage this sort of powerful hold on the reader while being somewhat less gaudy in her use of stage effects...